Waiting period.

Updated to provide context: Arizona state legislature passed last October a series of measures restricting access to abortions.

New Law Requires Women To Name Baby, Paint Nursery Before Getting Abortion

Remember our blogposts about obligatory ultra-sounds in the state of Oklahama for women who had consulted a physician regarding the possibility of terminating a pregnancy?

Consider the following:

If you've been paying attention to the erosion of reproductive rights over the last several years, it's the kind of headline that makes you think, "Man I hope that's from The Onion" for a split second before it sinks in that of course it is. For now. Riffing on state laws that require clinics to perform ultrasounds on pregnant women before an abortion, The Onion News Network offers a brilliant satire of anti-choice arguments in favor of assuming women who want to terminate a pregnancy are ignorant or delusional. They're just giving women "all the information they need to be sure they're making the right decision," of course - certainly not making unreasonable demands or using inflammatory language to manipulate emotions or anything.

It's all humour and lampoonry until someone loses a kidney.

Remember Rod Bruinooge? If he and that other ReformaTory MP Vellacott ever join forces on a gynophobic crusade to stop women from exercising reproductive choices, it will get right ugly.

Insite keeps legal right to maintain services.

Zoom at knitnut blogs about Cathy Crowe and wonders about the Insite appeal.

Good news!

Stevie Spiteful's ReformaTories lose their appeal; Insite maintains right to keep providing their Downtown Eastside clients with services.

Dr Gabor Maté is interviewed about his work in the DTES with the Onsite program.

I Still Feel Pretty

Though how he could after this, I can't imagine.

My all-time fave foto of Dear Leader, looking soooo prime ministerial.

(This is deBeauxOs's fault. This post of hers gave me an ear-worm that only this photo could cure.)

I feel pretty.

"I feel pretty.
Oh so pretty.
I feel pretty and witty and bright. ..."

Every morning Stevie Spiteful jumps out of bed, eager to meet the challenge of his next photo opportunity.

Where will it be take place? Does he have the required accoutrements and props?

Who shall serve as accessory in the picture? Any visiting dignitaries in town?

And thanks to the magic of Photoshop, he doesn't need to wear his XXL Spanx For Men™ if he wants to prorogue that torturous experience indefinitely.

Today's theme is Haïti. Where to find someone .... oh. And just imagine, he has her number too.

(This post was inspired by C. C's Stephen Harper: King of the classless photo-op.)

Some media are more worthy than others.

JJ reported in her blogpost 'Teabagging Behind Closed Doors' that the organizers of the upcoming February convention were not giving the media access to events.

Today a different story is told.

The Tea Party Convention put out a press release today announcing that they were packed and had space for just five news outlets: "Everyone from a small town newspaper in Iowa to Fox News has asked for press credentials. We have had requests from Canada, England, France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Norway, Croatia and Japan. We have been hard pressed to accommodate all of these requests and do not have the space or resources to support the entirety of the press corp. Indeed, we have asked the hotel if they would be willing to provide a press room during the convention.

However, given these practical limitations, we have approved the following press organizations: Fox News, Breitbart.com, Townhall.com, The Wall Street Journal, World Net Daily."

From here. A Nashville news source is saying that Sarah Palin will allow other media during her speech too. And also. Unless of course it's those narsty Alaskans she had banned from her book-signing shindig last month in Wasilla, you betcha.

You have to wonder how the organizers plan to control the bloggers and exactly how TPN credentials can be determined, for those who aren't part of the establishment. Spell checks?

Yeah, that's probably the ticket in. Anyone who can prove they're grammatically challenged and can pay the $549. to attend (plus $349 for the banquet), as well as spew the standard anti-healthcare reform barking points on command will be allowed in.

No Prorogue! Thursday Round-up

Polls, polls, polls. Good grief, they even got me today. For the first time in my life, I was called by a political polling company. Ekos robo-called me and asked do I think the country is going in the right direction and which party would I vote for if elections were held tomorrow, both federal and provincial. Then a bunch of demographic questions. It was all very straightforward, no clues as to who is paying for it.

(Question for poll-geeks: Robo also asked: 'Of the people in your household, are you the one with the most recent birthday?' WTF are they going for there?)

Here Susan Delacourt blogs on recent polls (emphasis mine).

Ekos weighs in today with its findings, showing that yesterday's Strategic Counsel poll is no rogue poll. The two surveys are showing that the Conservatives are being punished in public-opinion terms for the shutdown of Parliament.

Journalists had been expecting this, because of a less-scientific survey method, based on comments to blogs and websites over the last week or so. The simple science is this: the nastier and more juvenile the comments, the more trouble the Conservatives are probably facing. In my occasional role here as comments moderator, I've realized that the appearance of certain lines of attack (some of them unpublishable) are a sure sign of panic. It's like that old rule of political reporting -- if a politician or a flak says to you "that's not a story," it probably is. And if critics are going to ferocious and personal lengths to tell you that no one cares about Parliament being shut down, well, you can probably figure that people do care. So keep those cards and letters coming -- by their shrillness, they will be measured.

Must be fun to call somebody -- not a woman, not a feminist -- shrill.

In related news, we reported back here on our gobsmackedness over sharing a revulsion over the prorogation with Connie Fournier of Free Dominion.

She started another thread on Janaury 8, titled 'Someone tell the CPC to stop it . . . it's embarrassing'.

She's referring to the pro-prorogue Facebook group.

I went to look at the facebook group called |I SUPPORT the Prorogation of Parliament and the Prime Minister of Canada", and it is really embarrassing.

First of all, the group has barely 500 members (compared to the 'anti' group which has around 100,000). But, a quick search of the members of the group shows that many of the members are not even real people. A lot of them have no friends, or they are just friends with one other person (usually another member of the group). They are simply shell characters that have nothing in their profiles but a bunch of groups they have joined.

I don't mean any disrespect to any of you who have joined this group because I know that some of my friends are, in fact, members.

But, the organizer of the group is obviously a fake identity being used by someone affiliated with the CPC, and they are doing such an amateurish job that they are probably hurting the cause more than they are helping it.

If they are going to hire someone to do social networking for them, they should hire someone who has a clue what they are doing. d'oh!

On January 13, she posted:

Today is it called: "I SUPPORT the Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper".

They must have decided that having "prorogation" in the group title wasn't doing the trick.

They have 843 members now. I wonder if the name change will help them catch up with the "No" group. They've narrowed the gap to less than 182,000 now, anyway.

Go, Steve, go! Laughing

(Big City Lib is also amused by this.)

So, as a very newbie Facebook user, I was fooling around today and got into searching for friends and entered 'Connie Fournier'. Got her. Sent her a message. Something like: I saw how angry you are about the prorogation at FD, why doncha join the group?

She replied: *big grin* I joined several days ago.

My reply: Cool. Is this public knowledge?

Her: Yes. I put a banner for the No Prorogue site up at FD, which, by the way, is the easiest way to find out about rallies in your city/town.

High fives all round. Non-partisanship to the max!



In other other related news, membership growth is slowing at Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament, so it's time to bug your friends and relations again.

And finally, everyone should bookmark this excellent piece of work by Thor at Driving the Porcelain Bus on the many, many crimes against democracy, accountability, transparency, and decency by the ReformaTories. Thank you, Thor.

Epic Battle of Dangerously Deluded Patriarchs

Sometimes the tsunami of rightwingnutter religious zealotry and insanity gets overwhelming, even for those dedicated to observing its surges.

Fortunately, we can always count upon our splendid blogging colleagues to rise to the challenge.

Marion Pat Robertson and Pope Maledict made headlines this week for the usual reasons. As expected, they cranked up the religious rightwingnutz quotient.

From Nunc Scio:

Yesterday, on his daily television show, Robertson suggested that Haiti is “cursed” because it made a pact with the devil to secure its freedom from France in 1804. You can watch the video here, because I don’t want such vile material on my blog. You’ll recall that Rev. Robertson, a prominent religious conservative, also thinks that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for America’s sinful ways. [...]

This is an excellent example of what I like to call the “Onion of Insanity”. [...] In this case, the Onion of Insanity has three layers:

1) Incredible indifference to human suffering. Thousands upon thousands of people were killed in Haitian earthquake, and many million more are struggling through the aftermath. To suggest that this cataclysm is somehow the fault of the Haitian people is monstrous. It is especially disgusting to suggest that this punishment is the result of an alleged event that can only be described as superstitious nonsense.

Read the whole thing. You'll learn a new evaluative tool for discerning the levels of batshit-crazy whenever you encounter the religiously deranged.

From Slap Upside the Head: Pope Maledict ...

speaking to several diplomats in Vatican City last week, called gay men and women—and the laws that protect their human rights—a threat to no less than all of humankind.

“Creatures differ from one another,” he began, “and can be protected or endangered in different ways, as we know from daily experience. One such attack comes from laws or proposals which, in the name of fighting discrimination, strike at the biological basis of the difference between sexes. I am thinking,” he continued, “of certain countries in Europe or North and South America.” [...]

OK, the pope’s argument isn’t well veiled. It’s also a tired one. It basically says that since gay couples can’t biologically reproduce with each other, enough gay people will spell the death of all humankind. Except that, you know, it wouldn’t.

In response to this - "Yet freedom cannot be absolute, since man is not himself God, but the image of God, God’s creation. For man, the path to be taken cannot be determined by caprice or willfulness, but must rather correspond to the structure willed by the Creator", may I remind our readers that Mother Nature and/or God terminates thousands of pregnancies in the first trimester, and thus for women to make such choices with the assistance of medical care would seem to "correspond to the structure willed by the Creator".

Marion and Maledict - two peas in a gynophobic pod.

ReformaTory Vitriol

One of the excellent uses people are making of the Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament Facebook group is posting links, old and new, to potent examples of the Harpocans' arrogrance, misuse of power, spitefulness, and disdain for Canadian institutions and values.

Here's one that combines all those ReformaTory features -- plus someone DIED.

The entire staff of a government-funded rights advocacy group is calling for the resignation of three Conservative appointees from the board of directors, including the chairman.

The extraordinary letter from the staff of Rights and Democracy – a non-partisan, two-decade old advocacy body – follows the death last week of president Remy Beauregard, who died of a heart attack following a vitriolic board meeting.

I don't know anything about Rights and Democracy or its president. But my sweetie has a heart condition and the people around him, family, friends, co-workers, know it. Of course, people do have heart attacks out of the blue, but most of them happen to people with known problems. If it were known that M. Beauregard had a heart condition, it's pretty disgusting that the people around him let a meeting with him get so out of control as to be described as 'vitriolic'. Because we know how well ReformaTories do vitriol. Like this guy:




On the brighter side, it looks like spines are sprouting up everywhere. Well, except for our absolutely useless opposition parties.

ADDED: I should have included a link to Rights and Democracy's site. It looks like they do good work.

MEA CULPA: I hadn't read Dr Dawg on this before I wrote. You should.

More on same-sex marriage.

Legal arguments smoothly follow one another, punctuated by emotional testimony of how Proposition 8 humiliates gay men and lesbians who wish to wed, inside the courtroom where the constitutionality of the ban on same-sex marriage is on trial. Outside, banners and hand-held posters reduce them to statements that are as pithy as a tweet on twitter.

Vanity Fair's Open Bar Blog offers 5 requirements for those who wish to debate the legitimacy of same-sex marriages. Here's one that would eliminate a considerable number of rightwing religious conservative zealots - and not only those in politics.

No. 2: Any person who has or who is at this very moment committing adultery, or any other action which directly undermines the “traditions” associated with marriage, also hereby forfeits the right to tell same-sex couples that they can’t try to stay loyal and honest in their relationship. These liars, cheats and scoundrels (of both sexes) have done more to undermine marriage over the centuries than any two men kissing could ever dream of doing.

Indeed.